The Virginia Quarterly Review

The Virginia Quarterly Review is a magazine focusing on current and historical literary subjects. Since it was founded in 1925, it is produced quarterly. The magazine is published by the Virginia Quarterly Review.Subjects for The Virginia Quarterly Review include literature and literary reviews. The editor is Ted Genoways. Contributing editors are Molly Minturn and Kevin Morrissey

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Articles from Vol. 74, No. 4, Autumn

An Appreciation of Francis Bacon

DISCUSSIONS OF RECENT BOOKS AN APPRECIATION OF FRANCIS BACON By JOHN PORTMAN Francis Bacon. By Perez Zagorin. Princeton. $29.95 In the sumptuously appointed Master's Lodge of Trinity College, Cambridge University hang adjacent to one another portraits...

"At the end of one of Derrida's N.Y.U. classes, a student asks him where his discussion of secrets is heading. Derrida stares at a point above the crowd packed three or four deep around the seminar table. What is really at stake in this seminar,' he...

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. By John Brewer. Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux. $40.00. Some years ago, reflecting on philosophical changes that, for better and for worse, have altered our sense of the world...

It was Feb. 2, 1959 and in Arlington, Virginia the authorities were preparing for four children to go to school the next day: Michael Jones, Gloria Thompson, Lance Newman, and Ronald Deskins. They lived less than a mile down Route 29 from the school,...

August 1 The principal of the college leads me from her office to the Visitors Room where the English department is waiting to receive me. Seventeen women cluster about the small room, watching me as I enter, some smiling, some suspicious, some caught...

The thin light of the approaching daybreak always seemed to emphasize the strangeness and foreignness of our battalion's bivouac area on a country road outside Casablanca. Every morning a heavy mist covered the land just before the sun rose. Then, as...

SURVEYING THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL SCENE By SANFORD PINSKER Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in Amercian Life. By William M. Banks. W.W. Norton. $29.95. Thirty-odd years ago Harold Cruse's The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual set out to hammer...

For most scholars, finding a niche in an already developed field and contributing something significant to it constitutes a sufficient achievement. Melvin Kranzberg, however, accomplished much more. By the time of his death at the age of 78 in December...

In the current rage for memoir and documentary adventure, it is easy to forget the seeming paradox that fiction, when masterfully written, can always journey closest to the truth. It can also travel inward to irrelevance, and the Irish writer John Banville's...

From the day her husband Coot Green set fire to her honeymoon clothes, Ouida Green had stayed annoyed with him. In the 30 years since, Ouida arranged the details into an amusing story for women who came into her dress shop: she and Coot left their wedding...

Of all of Thomas Jefferson's myriad of interests, none was more profound and lasting than what ROBERT A. FERGUSON calls his "lifelong obsession" with Monticello. Jefferson began construction of the house on the "Little Mountain" in 1768 and left the...

Hell, I don't know exactly what it was. Because sometimes the drugs (more on that later) and the mess with sweet Cressida (I wish there was more on that) don't seem to matter as much. And for me up there under the cloverleaf in the heat of this Texas...

At last they've all gone away: they've taken their soup pots, pasta bowls, lasagna pans, pie plates, the vases they stuffed-first with chrysanthemums and dahlias, and later with sedum and asters and fall hydrangeas. Brittle pods skitter like mice over...

William Fauldner's 'War Wound': Reflections on Writing and Doing, Knowing and Remembering

or most Americans, Armistice Day is indistinguishable from those other Mondays when the mail does not come. Even for the military, this observance has lost most historical connections with the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of...

'With What Majesty Do We There Ride above the Storms!' Jefferson at Monticello

Thomas Jefferson's lifelong obsession with Monticello helps to explain both the nature of his thought and the mysteries of the man. Owner, architect, and construction manager all in one, he began in 1768 but repeatedly tore apart his own handiwork, rebuilding...

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. By Sam Tanenhaus. Random House. $35.00. cloth. Modern Library. $16.00 paper. No event in the post World War II decade more awakened the American people to the realities of the Cold War than did the Hiss-Chambers case....